Russian Thinkers Chapter Abstracts for Teachers

Russia and 1848

• After the failed revolutions in Europe in 1848, Tsar Nicholas I Romanov moved away from reform toward a clampdown on dissenters, radicals, and censorship of literature.
• The Tsar's repressive techniques resulted in the arrest of the Petrachevsky Circle, and Fyodor Dostoevsky was exiled to Siberia as a result.
• The radicalism of Russians only hardened under repression, and in isolation from the west, opposition became inbred and Slavophilic.

The Hedgehog and the Fox

• Berlin uses the adage about the fox and the hedgehog to describe Tolstoy as a materialist who saw the value of being an idealist.
• The grand designs the idealist sees were at work in Tolstoy's works, but the authorial eye could only see them, never the characters.
• Tolstoy steered a middle way in which he focused on the moral possibilities of individual life.